One, Two, Many Messes
by Jim Lobewww.dissidentvoice.org
April 12, 2004

While
the United States does not look quite yet like the ''pitiful, helpless
giant'' that tortured Richard Nixon's imagination during the Vietnam War,
the past week's events seem to have moved it very much in that direction.

The week, which was
supposed to culminate in celebrations of the first anniversary of Baghdad's
''liberation'' by U.S. forces, ended instead with Marines engaged on several
fronts in precisely the kind of urban warfare that they blissfully avoided a
year ago, with U.S.-trained Iraqi police and security forces deserting their
posts in the face of insurgent challenges, the seizure of at least a
half-dozen foreign hostages and the assumptions that underlay a year's worth
of "nation-building" in Iraq in a shambles.

''What a mess'', became the
dominant refrain when Washington cafe and subway conversations turned to
Iraq this week, as the impression that the administration of President
George W Bush was taken completely by surprise by the latest turn of events
appeared to take hold among the city's residents. Much to the
administration's chagrin, "Vietnam" was the most frequently cited metaphor
on television.

As right wing Georgia
Republican and Bush arch-loyalist Senator Saxby Chambliss confessed
Wednesday, the administration ''underestimated just how difficult and
complex the job in Iraq would be''.

Like, duh.

Since just last Sunday,
some 42 U.S. soldiers have been killed in fighting in the ''Sunni
Triangle'', the Shia south and in Baghdad itself. Hundreds of Iraqis have
also been killed, including, according to latest reports, as many as 450 in
the besieged Sunni city of Fallujah.

Few observers believe that
the rag-tag militias and gangs that have taken on U.S. forces pose a serious
threat to Washington's vast military might. (And, in a familiar Vietnam-era
refrain, U.S. officers insisted that they had won every engagement with the
insurgents.)

But by the end of the week,
it was clear that military power was, in another Vietnam metaphor, not only
losing "hearts and minds", but actually building a stronger insurgency.

Evidence to that effect
became clear by mid-week when the media reported Baghdad residents -- Shia
as well as Sunni -- lining up to donate blood and relief supplies for
Fallujah, the centre of Sunni resistance to the occupation since 13 of its
residents were killed by U.S. soldiers during a demonstration almost exactly
one year ago.

The political implications,
both at home and in Iraq, of the week's fighting -- and the shattered
illusions that it revealed -- are enormous.

To begin with, the
administration has long insisted that, with the help of 20,000 troops from
the "coalition of the willing", and the presence of nearly 80,000 Iraqi
police recruited and deployed by the occupation over the past year, it could
easily afford to reduce its own military presence in Iraq from 135,000 to
110,000 by June.

But with the uprising by
Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army in Baghdad and several southern cities,
those plans appear to be out the window.

When challenged by the
insurgents, most of Iraq's new security forces either joined them or went
home while, aside from Britain, the "coalition of the willing", already
anticipating the loss of 1,300 Spanish troops due to last month's elections
in Spain, looked shakier than ever.

After losing one soldier,
the Ukrainian contingent in Kut retreated to a more secure base (leaving its
arsenal to be seized by the Mahdi Army), while several other national
contingents confined their troops to base or simply got out of the way.

The net result is that U.S.
withdrawal plans have been effectively suspended, and pressure is building
on the administration to send as many as 30,000 more troops to bolster a
force that suddenly looked beleaguered and vulnerable.

''The uniformed military
does not speak out publicly, but the generals are outraged'', reported
'Washington Post' columnist Robert Novak, who has close ties to the Pentagon
brass.

But even if the
administration agrees to add troops, analysts agree that, given the
drastically stepped-up deployments of forces since 9/11 and the already
greater-than-anticipated use and poor morale of the army and reserves
deployed to Iraq over the past year, they might be very difficult to muster.
"Imperial overstretch is a very real factor at this point", one official
told IPS this week.

Moreover, any increase in
troops risks being seen not only as an unprecedented admission by Bush of
fallibility and poor planning, but also as an "escalation" in the war, a
definite no-no for an administration that is already consumed with avoiding
anything evoking Vietnam less than seven months before the election.

Polling by the Pew Research
Centre showed that approval of Bush's performance on Iraq has plunged from
59 percent in January to 40 percent early this week and that 57 percent of
the public now believe he has no plan for how to proceed.

"There's a sense that
things are perhaps spinning out of control, and that's a very dangerous
perception", Carroll Doherty, the Pew report's editor, told the 'Christian
Science Monitor'.

A second cherished illusion
that has now been shattered is that Sadr was a marginal figure within the
Shiite community whose leadership remained committed -- if warily -- to a
U.S.-controlled transition, so long as it believed the eventual outcome
would reward and empower the community's majority status.

Sadr might indeed have been
marginal, but the occupation's own ham-handedness -- in first closing his
newspaper and then arresting a senior aide at the same time it prepared an
attack on Fallujah -- has clearly empowered him and the anti-occupation
cause for which he, and Fallujah, now stand.

All week long,
administration and occupation officials insisted that Sadr and his militia,
estimated at just a few thousand poorly trained men, could be isolated from
the Shia leadership. But as the days passed and the insurgency in the south
spread, it became increasingly clear that the opposite was taking place.

Not only did Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on whom U.S. hopes for Shia acquiescence in the
transitional process had increasingly been riding, fail to denounce Sadr,
but members of rival militias began rallying to his cause, according to
published reports.

Worse, photos of Sadr began
appearing in Sunni parts of Baghdad and in and around Fallujah amid reports
of growing co-operation between Sunni and Shia rebels that, for U.S. forces,
is the most worrisome development to date.

"We have to work very hard
to ensure that (Sunni-Shia cooperation) remains at the tactical level
(only)", Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the occupation's top commander, told
reporters Thursday.

"The unintended result (of
cracking down on Sadr the same week as the attack on Fallujah) was that
America finally brought Shiites and Sunnis together -- in opposing
occupation", noted David Ignatius, a Post columnist who has generally
supported U.S. actions in Iraq.

The degree to which the
occupation's crackdown had backfired politically against Washington became
abundantly clear by Friday night, when even members of the U.S.-appointed
Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) felt it necessary to distance themselves from
their patron.

IGC elder statesman Adnan
Pachachi, who is especially close to the State Department, denounced the
offensive against Fallujah as "illegal and totally unacceptable", while Iyad
Allawi, a prominent Shiite and long-time favorite of the U.S. and British
intelligence service, abruptly resigned from the council without
explanation, as did the IGC's human rights minister, Abdel Basit Turki.

On Saturday, Mideast
historian Juan Cole wrote in
his Internet journal
that other council members had either fled the country or were on the verge
of resigning. He predicted, "an incipient collapse of the U.S. government of
Iraq".

According to Ignatius,
"U.S. military forces in Iraq this week sadly became what they have been
trying for a year to avoid becoming -- an army of occupation fighting a
bitter urban war against a broad Iraqi insurgency."